Unemployment stats

[INdemo]

Ok folks.......If when Bill Clinton was President we had a surplus and our national debt was nil..Our unemployment was at the lowest in fifty years..Now all of the sudden (since Bush has become the puppet President) our deficit has grown to where my Grandkids, grandkids will still be paying for it. Now the Repubs are saying our national employment is the highest ever..Come on Republicans do you expect us to believe this BS..The Labor Dept. statistics have to written by Karl Rove..Think about it

[stillcool]

1. Unemployment figures...

are a national security risk. Must be classified. We can not allow the enemy to know the true figures...they could use it against us.

[papau]

2. The percentage working has dropped, but the number working has risen as

we have more people? (although 1.5 million of those newly "working" under Bush are the estimated and never checked pretend who are counted as the birth/death increase in stay at home home jobs of folks that don't get into the payroll tax system -the 400,000 Ebayers and a few others, I guess. For the record, 8 years of Clinton brought us around 400,000 of such workers out of 22 million new jobs, if I recall correctly.).

I did not check the stat, but the above is my memory - and if I recall it correctly, then the GOP comment, as misleading as it is, is possible.

[Chicago1]

3. Unemployment number ARE COMPLETELY WRONG

These numbers DO NOT include people who have fallen off of unemployment.

So any stat that I see in the news is WRONG!!!

DON'T BELIEVE ANY OF THEM.

[skids]

5. Well, they are wrong, but they do include off-unemployment.

They claim to do a phone survey to find workers who are seeking but not on unemployment. But I still wouldn't trust the numbers. They are so cooked.

[TahitiNut]

4. "national debt was nil."?? WRONG.

[INdemo]

7. Ok,OK

Ok...we had a budget surplus..Our check book balanced and money in our savings but we still had a mortgage payment..That sound better and more accurate..

[TahitiNut]

8. It's important to recognize that we've NEVER reduced the Debt.

... at any time since World War II. While we slowed its growth during the Clinton/Gore years, it has NEVER gone down in current dollar terms.

[dave123williams]

6. If they're willing to lie to get us in to a war....maybe it's not such a

stretch of the imagination to think that they're maybe doctoring the unemployment numbers a tad....

[Lasher]

9. People, you are falling for an old trick.

Desperate to show that their supply side economic theory is more than just an attempt to morally justify stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, Republicans have changed the question to try to make it look like they have come up with a good answer. You would certainly hope that the NUMBER OF EMPLOYED is the highest ever. That's because our population has increased. The NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED is also higher.

The real question is, what is the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE? This is a key economic indicator. This "number of employed" garbage is not.

Here are the FACTS from U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics web site at http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&series_id=LNS14000000

***

Series Id: LNS14000000Seasonal AdjustedSeries title: (Seas) Unemployment RateLabor force status: Unemployment rateType of data: PercentAge: 16 years and over

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1995 5.6 5.4 5.4 5.8 5.6 5.6 5.7 5.7 5.6 5.5 5.6 5.6
1996 5.6 5.5 5.5 5.6 5.6 5.3 5.5 5.1 5.2 5.2 5.4 5.4
1997 5.3 5.2 5.2 5.1 4.9 5.0 4.9 4.8 4.9 4.7 4.6 4.7
1998 4.6 4.6 4.7 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.6 4.5 4.4 4.4
1999 4.3 4.4 4.2 4.3 4.2 4.3 4.3 4.2 4.2 4.1 4.1 4.0
2000 4.0 4.1 4.0 3.8 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.1 3.9 3.9 3.9 3.9
2001 4.2 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.3 4.5 4.6 4.9 5.0 5.3 5.6 5.7
2002 5.7 5.7 5.7 5.9 5.8 5.8 5.8 5.7 5.7 5.7 5.9 6.0
2003 5.8 5.9 5.8 6.0 6.1 6.3 6.2 6.1 6.1 6.0 5.9 5.7
2004 5.7 5.6 5.7 5.5 5.6 5.6 5.5 5.4 5.4 5.5 5.4 5.4
2005 5.2 5.4 5.2 5.2 5.1 5.0 5.0 4.9

Note provided on edit: All the percentages are there. The numbers just don't match up with the monthly columns.

***

Please visit the site, where you will find a graph that reflects these numbers. More importantly, you can retrieve unemployment rates from as far back as 1948. Elsewhere at the site, you can find unemployment rates that are specific to each of the states.

In case you want to hear more from me about supply side economics and the unemployment rate, here is a link to an article I did a while back.

http://modernamerica.blogspot.com/2005/06/supply-side-economics.html

[lumberjack_jeff]

10. the unemployment rate uses a subjective denominator

Workforce is the people employed PLUS those unemployed who are looking for work.
The BLS uses surveys to obtain this number. Since 2000 the workforce has declined as a share of the population. Since the unemployment rate is the percentage of the workforce who do not have jobs, a systematic reduction in the (wholly theoretical) number of people who are in the workforce has the effect of reducing the unemployment rate.

A significantly smaller percentage of the population have jobs today than in 2000.

[Lasher]

11. Good point

Jeff,

When setting forth an argument with Republicans, I keep it as simple as I reasonably can, so that even they have a chance of understanding, and also to limit chances that the debate might get sidetracked onto something else. Historical unemployment rates are pretty straightforward on the surface, and broadly recognized as a statistic.

There are those living among us who are no longer part of the workforce, as you have eloquently pointed out. Finding only McJobs to replace more desirable employment that they have lost, many have given up looking for work. I believe this accounts for most of the decline in the total workforce, excluding traditional factors such as retirement and death.

There are also those who have lost decent jobs, and have had no choice but to take any work they could find. Minimum wage jobs have replaced decent salaries with health care benefits and hopes for pensions. These working poor are counted only as 'employed' in the statistics I have shared.

[lumberjack_jeff]

12. A picture is worth 997 words.

This is the employment-population ratio. It represents the percentage of the population over 16 years old who are employed.

The three words that this picture lacks are "Bush done it".

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics

edited to add the link

[Lasher]

14. Interesting, Jeff

I went back a few decades and compared these statistics with unemployment rates. There is a direct relationship. When one goes up, the other goes down. Makes sense.

[mrcheerful]

13. Sorry to tell you this............

but since 1981 Reagan changed the unemployment count as those only getting unemployment checks, Welfare and those searching are left off the unemployed list. As well as your no longer counted as unemployed when you stop getting unemployment checks regaurdless if you found a job or mot.

[Lasher]

15. With the same formula used since that time...

the numbers are relative, serving as a benchmark of how the economy is doing in comparison to other time frames. Even so, the numbers can be manipulated. For example, prior to the 2004 election, the WV Bureau of Employment Programs was unusually assertive in denying claims for unemployment compensation. I believe this was orchestrated in every state by the Bush administration, to artificially improve reported unemployment rates.

I didn't set out to defend the methods used for calculation of unemployment rates. I'm saying that Republicans are trying to change the subject from the unemployment rate to national employment (total number of employed) so that they can deceitfully claim we're now doing better than we ever have.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

16. Staggering ineptitude...

The total U.S. labor force when Clinton was leaving office was 132,484,000. The most recent figure shows the labor force at 133,999,000. This means that during that past five years, this administration has managed to create, on average, only about 25,000 jobs per month.

Keep in mind that with an expanding population, most labor experts agree that the economy needs to create at least 100,000 jobs per month just to keep up. Given the lackluster pace of job creation, we're about 4.5 million jobs shy of where we were in December of 2000.

Let's do some more math --

Cost of Bush Tax Cut: $1.8 Trillion (over the next ten years)
Jobs Created to Date: 1.5 million
Anticipated Jobs: 3 million (assuming that the economy can at least sustain its current job growth, which is a pretty dicey assumption)

So if you take the cost of the tax cut and divide it by the number of anticipated new jobs created, we get a figure of about $600,000 per new job. Damn! I wish I could get me one of those new jobs!